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.The information in the press made this world comprehensible and accessible.Yet, in addition to these facts, writers provided further dimensions by creating an image of sport that transcended the everyday world.It is to this, our third category, that we must now turn.The creation of an attractive, interesting, image for sport was accomplished in three ways.First, journalists and artists would present sporting activity and the sporting world as glamorous and fashionable in itself, by way of prose and art.Second, writers would pay great attention to the characters of sportsmen, which were portrayed as being of interest.Third, histories of sports would be produced, setting contemporary developments in a much wider chronological context.In 1811 The Manchester Mercury provided a description of the meaning of the following pugilistic idioms: ‘The fancy, A glutton, A milling, A Doubler, A floorer, The knock-down was clean, Nobbing, A rally, Dibbing’.42 Throughout the period, the columns of the press helped to disseminate, if not perhaps create, the unique vocabulary which was to be employed in pugilism.‘The Fancy’, a widely used slang term for those associated with robust sports in which gambling played an important part, communicated in a type of sub-English, which was full of vigorous phrases.It was a slang that seems to have had strong underworld links and was adopted by the boxing fraternity.43 All communications from pugilists appeared in its parlance, one from the American, Molineaux, ‘To The Military Lifeguards Man’read:As my late unsuccessful combat has set the knowing ones afloat to find another big man to mill me, and having just got flash enough to know some of the phrases, by which I understand you are the man I am next to contend with, I hereby challenge you for three hundred guineas, and as much more as your friends think proper any time betwixt this and Christmas.44The origin of this language is rather unclear, though many of the challenges issued in it by near illiterate boxers were clearly the work of journalists.45 A vital figure in its dissemination and popularization was the author and dramatist, Pierce Egan, who utilized much of the vocabulary in his history of boxing that appeared in 1812.This slang was uniquely tailored for the terms used in pugilism and was thus distinctively British, utterly thwarting French attempts to translate, which were always ridiculed.46 Contemporaries found it seductive and it successfully conveyed the glamorous, dangerous, image that sport loved to project.Another vital force in creating the public image of sport as something glamorous and powerful was art.Engravings of sporting subjects had always been part of The Sporting Magazine, larger versions of the prints being sold separately.The Sporting Magazine prided itself on cultivating a taste for art among its country readership, and provided highly descriptive reviews of exhibitions, focusing38Beginnings of a Commercial Sporting Culture in Britainparticularly on pictures involving animals.47 Such concern implicitly conferred a social prestige on the subject.Many important artists, such as Gilpin and Moreland, were involved in this enterprise.Both sportsmen and animals tended to be presented in heroic terms, with the emphasis being on the bravery rather than the cruelty within a scene.Generally, the vitality of animals was highly respected and at a bull-bait the artist sought to ‘portray the courage and contending passion of the majestic bull’.48 Such presentations had a robust immediacy that completely circumvented all moral problems.Although the scene that was being presented was potentially very cruel, the viewer’s attention was absorbed by the strength and courage of the animal.The second facet in the creation of an interesting image for sport was its concern for the characters of particular sportsmen, especially biography.The sporting press covered the various quarrels between sportsmen in some detail, particularly that between Mr Flint and Colonel Thornton.They also focused on the low life led by certain individuals, such as the painter, Moreland, who regularly produced commissions while in prison in order to secure release from debt.In this they were simply pandering to contemporary desires for salacious material and ‘character assassination’.49 Yet, predominantly, they were analytic, applying a scientific approach to the composition of biography.Generally speaking, only infamous criminals among the lower orders received personal attention in the press.50However, sporting literature often focused on the characters of individuals who had displayed a significant aptitude for particular sports, regarding them as worthy subjects for both biographies and obituaries.Some, such as Wilson, an itinerant vendor, even received a highly detailed biography in The Times.51 While such an occurrence demonstrated that sporting literature focused attention on a wider social spectrum than was customary elsewhere, such accounts tended to be aridly factual.Alternatively, there were two other approaches to biography.Pierce Egan’s Boxiana presented pugilists, who were men from a humble social sphere, in dramatic, fictionalized terms, elevating them to immortal status.By contrast, The Sporting Magazine, though its reports often represented the activities of individuals as heroic, treated the characters of the protagonists in a more abrasive manner.While it was quite willing to satirize the whole genre of biography, as with‘The history of Pero – a buck hound’, generally it adhered to a very exacting criteria which stressed the requirements of balance and honesty.52 The aim was to provide a scientific analysis of the character of the biography’s subject
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